A novel needs an arc of story, a fundamental crisis, depth - not surface

A novel needs an organizing shape, an arc of plot development and a collision of forces, a conflict that sets the story on edge and in motion, and we should get deeper into the novel and its characters and its setting as it progresses - and this is the problem with A.S. Byatt's "The Children's Book" - it has none of this. Despite Byatt's amazing breadth of knowledge and skill with language, or because of this, or because of her past success (Possession), it seems she feels as if she can just light the flame and the novel will write itself. Or right itself. It won't. The novel begins with such great promise - three boys meet up in a museum basement, each quite different, Philip the most intriguing, a Dickensian waif with great talent and ambition, but Byatt loses hold of this plot strand as she introduces us over the next 250 pages to literally dozens of characters and multiple themes and settings - the book never settles, it just moves along, and it feels as if the plot, such as it is, just happens - we get a chronology of the lives of the characters, a series of episodes, but there's no feeling of crisis or of inevitability. One example: it looked as if we were onto something when the Wellwood marriage is in jeopardy as Olive discovers Humphry's infidelity, but, no, the marriage just stumbles along, Olive provides Humphry with money to send to the other woman (we haven't met her, yet). Major hint dropped that not all of the Wellwood children are his, but this isn't developed. Byatt buils miniature plots - Tom at boarding school, Charles's foray into radical politics, Philip learning his craft - but doesn't make much of any of them, just keeps writing along, introducing more elements, more interpolated passages from Olive's writing, skimming along the surface like a figure skater on ice.